


Complementary

by arcanemoody



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Despair, Dreams and Nightmares, Edward Nygma's Misuse of Medication, Happy Ending, Lucius is doing the best he can with the tools he has, M/M, No Man's Land, Paranoia, Pining, Season/Series 05, don't be like Ed, given his history with hallucinations, take pills as directed you guys, tramadol is probably not the best thing for Ed's post-chip pain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:55:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22071382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arcanemoody/pseuds/arcanemoody
Summary: After the chip comes out, after he kills a soldier with a meat cleaver to the forehead, after Harvey Bullock solves one of his riddles (and his consternation for that has no cure), Ed is at a loose end.
Relationships: Oswald Cobblepot/Edward Nygma
Comments: 6
Kudos: 90





	Complementary

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gabrie_DwelleR](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gabrie_DwelleR/gifts).



> Written for the Nygmobblepot Haven Secret Santa 2019.

This might as well happen, Ed thinks. It’s a familiar form of exhausted resignation: he felt the same way waiting in the car with Jim before being handed off to the Court of Owls. As he did when Oswald set him adrift after being thawed, no longer good enough to even be a centerpiece. When Lee stabbed him in the belly. 

After the chip is out, after the misdeeds and ways he’s been used and misused are laid bare, he (predictably) has only himself for company. Himself, his books, the course of antibiotics and painkillers Lucius gave him. He also has the fragments of a couple IEDs, the memories of an inferno in which three hundred people perished, and the fact that _Harvey Bullock_ solved one of his riddles at the precise moment he needed NO ONE to have the answer (his consternation for that last one has no cure). A million loose ends never to be fixed. 

This world that so disorients him, that he had worked so hard to master, somehow makes even less sense than it did before.

He locks himself into his cot for the night, for familiarity and comfort as much as the lingering suspicion that, even without the interference of a third party, his alter could take his body on walkabout without his permission. To where and to do what he can only guess. No grand stage for Riddler’s talents in this comic wasteland. Not much need for Ed’s either.

His head throbs dully against the flattened pillow (two extra-cranial procedures in less than three days and only one of them with his consent). He dry swallows both pills and lets his eyes slip closed.

\--

_I’m going to fix you._

Those words are enough to jolt him away after three hours of fitful sleep, spasming against his restraints. He winces, eyes burning, hands seeking out the lock at his waist, the comfort of cold steel and rust. Those memories taste like static and burn like an errant thumb slipped too low on a soldering iron — the pain only fully registers in the aftermath; hurts more as it heals.

His stomach spasms a second time, the chains snug and cold, soothing the cramp that makes the lower half of him feels like it’s trying to twist him from the inside (so many things he can’t stomach these days). He winces as tears well up, prickling the dry corners of his eyes (he was dehydrated before he went to bed, this is bound to make it worse).

Pain likes to sneak up on him in his sleep: both the pain he took and the pain he inflicted. His father’s punches, stray bullets, hands around his neck, Lee’s knife, _his knife_. Sometimes all at once. Lee’s knife, being the most recent, lingers the longest. Sharp, lancing pain turned numb and cold, wet, darkness and paralysis as he stared up at the exposed rafters of Cherry’s which, at some point, had been replaced by intricate stained glass. 

_Ed, I‘m going to fix you._

That memory, buried in early death (unlike him). Oswald, eyes wet, hair lank against his forehead, lips pursed, a small swallow as he forces the words out… no longer the menacing image he first took it for. The pain in his stomach twists upward and slightly to the left. 

He still doesn’t understand.

Oswald had found them both: bled out and cold on a filthy floor. Had cried over them (over him). And he’d still paid to bring them back. 

No one is who he thought they were -- even him (especially him). The cruelest variable in the coldest equation: how does every friendship end? Balanced on a knife’s edge as he awaits the other half of himself taunting the answer at him from the shadows. Because it hadn’t. This thing with him and Oswald never ends. Not with betrayal and not in death. And if death couldn’t beget an ending, he wasn’t sure anything could (wasn’t sure he wanted it to). 

“Aren’t you going to say anything?!” he barks accusingly, at the lack of familiar laughter from the darkness.  
  
In the throws of exhaustion plus anxiety, plus antibiotics mixed with pain medication, it’s ridiculously easy to conjure a familiar figure perched in the leather chair next to the empty fireplace. Oswald is dry this time, clad in the suit he saw him wear last, sharp lines, blending into the darkness, the shot of blood red in his tie the only color apart from piercing blue eyes.   
  
“This again? What chemical dependency is helping you along this time? Opiates? Sleep deprivation? Some combination of the two?"  
  
He doesn’t rise to the bait. A fever dream is a product of his mind and only he can stop his mind from hurting him (supposedly). 

“I had a headache.”

“And a stomachache from the looks of it. The things you get yourself into, Edward.“

 _“She stabbed me first_ ,” he shoots back, defensive now as the numbness of that newest of old wounds rips open, a shot of pain lancing across once numb skin. “But you already knew that.”

“I only know that because you do. That’s how hallucinations work.”

“No. You’ve staged enough murders over the years, it would have been a very easy conclusion to draw from the visual evidence.” By now, his old friend’s knowledge of crime scenes could rival any forensic scientist. A seasoned criminal, accustomed to drawing first blood when the victims least suspected it. And Lee and Oswald were a lot alike when it came to people they loved (and people they didn’t). “ _You knew_.”

“And if I did?” he asks, feeding off of Ed’s defensiveness (which abruptly deserts him). 

“Why did you save her?

“It wasn’t my place. She was yours.”  
  
Breathless laughter against his pillow, escalating to a crying jag without warning. Because the joke’s on Oswald (or the Oswald his brain has conjured up): Lee Thompkins was never his. In the end, Lee hadn’t even been much of a friend. Not the definition he’d come to know, closer to the benign neglect and patronizing behavior that had made up so many of his interactions with “friendly” colleagues at the GCPD. She hadn’t noticed when he’d split or put herself on the line to help him. She hadn’t so much as looked up when he was in the room. Even today.  
  
“I’m sorry about the bank vault."  
  
He doesn’t say it’s okay. Ed’s brain knows better. Forgiveness is too much to ask for, even from himself.  
  
\--  
  
Acquiring food had been effortless before in that Ed was never quite sure how his belly always seemed full or by what means it got that way, in the large gaps of time he could never account for. Three months without hunger. Now he’s awake, a fugitive to the entire city, and it's a much more difficult endeavor.

The rations he grabbed from the station are non-perishable, a few MREs, things he can probably get more of -- if he sneaks in again among the refugees. But he privately rules in favor of making those last (at least long enough for Jim to tell them the “bomb threat” was never real, even if the 300 dead at Haven were).

The fridge in the librarians’ lounge contains two slices of cheese pizza in a box with a delivery label dated four months earlier and half a container of Dijon mustard. He saws at the stale crust with a butter knife, warming it in wrapped foil and re-hydrating the cheese with water boiled over a camp stove, undoing weeks of retrogradation and crossing his fingers that the low heat and the acidity of the mustard will kill off any lingering bacteria. 

Judging by the way he heaves the remaining contents of his stomach ten minutes later, it did not.

—

Slipping out for supplies is a daunting prospect that might end up with him duct taped to a lawn chair again, but Ed makes the effort (he has no choice). Swapping his green suit jacket for a wool peacoat seems to make enough of a difference and his hair hangs in his eyes just enough to conceal his face. 

He keeps to the arterial streets that aren’t blocked off by piles of garbage and industrial rubble. Eventually, he ends up picking through the pillaged remains of the drug store on Grundy, pocketing bandages and adhesive strips, topical antibiotics in case the staples itch. He’s reaching for a bottle of Hibiclens at the back of a high shelf when he feels it.

There’s a shadow in his periphery. A too soft touch, light and sinister and just out of his view. His heart beats double time as he shoves his supplies into his bag and runs.

—  
  
Ed’s no longer sure he can sleep without locking himself into bed each night. His headache is mostly gone and he knows taking the pain meds for anything other than pain is a slippery slope. But the two remaining days of the antibiotic makes it easy for him to reason away any concerns.  
  
He swallows both pills with a gulp of too-warm bottled water, closes his eyes.  
  
“Someone’s been to the shops!” Oswald sing-songs, examining the supplies laid out on the table. “First aid, survival gear, pantry staples. Were you a Boy Scout or is this simply the byproduct of a life spent on the run?”  
  
Ed sighs in the darkness, relieved.

Years before his life of crime, foster care had taught him all about keeping his belongings lightweight, portable, and multipurpose: snacks, multi-tools, layered clothing, a good pair of gloves. The peshtemal his mother had so loved was a rare item he’d held on to from his old home (his old life) on Waterbury Lane. Made of long cotton fibers, it was useful as a towel, a blanket, a scarf, a soft bundle to augment his pillow. The pale sea foam-colored artifact of his past was probably still in the manor somewhere; secreted in his Bureau or draped over a hanger in the closet.

“Necessities,” he finally says, throat dry.

His hallucination smiles. “‘Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will see to themselves.’” 

“Did your mother teach you that?”

“And Fish. All of the rules for survival, I learned from her. It helped when I had to create a few of my own.”  
  
“I can imagine.” Obviously he could -- given the amount of detail in this imagined conversation. “Why did you shoot Butch?”  
  
“Once again, I only know the things _you_ can know.” 

“I know you regret it.”

A beat. His dreamed compatriot freezing for a long moment, like pause button had been flipped somewhere. On, then off. 

“Yes.”

“Because he was your friend.”

“Yes.”

_Which is why I needed you!_

Ed turns his head to face the other side of the room, eyes stinging.  
  
Oswald, far from stupid, who needed another man that constantly betrayed him like he needed another hole in his gut... but didn’t have an agenda beyond making him Not Dead.

He knows the feeling. 

Bringing Oswald back from the edge of that precipice between life and death... it had been like when he won the riddle contest back in school. Triumph had filled his chest with warmth and aching pride that longed to be shared and could never be, silenced by propriety and the parameters that forced him into the company of facile, bad actors masquerading as men of virtue (when, really, they were just too mediocre to ever truly be bad). 

That warmth has lingered, never to be vanquished completely no matter how hard he tried. (He likes it, hates it, hates that he likes it…) Just as betrayal and death had twisted it, conspiracy and the shared joy of mutual rampage had loosened and reworked it into something resembling its original form. Enough that, afterward, he’d switched from the green tie of Myrtle’s toy boy suits to the soft purple, similar to his friend’s green tourmaline cufflinks; affinity, complementary. Even before that, there was their _tête-à-tête_ in Arkham, tears in his old friend’s eyes as he said Riddler’s name, laughed with him, stalled all of the clever, intricate escape plans he had initially laid out — because his son needed to be rescued first. 

That thought is enough to make him forget to breathe, sleep slipping farther from his fingers. Oswald’s son, “my boy,” abducted and in jeopardy would need to be concealed or spirited out of Gotham before the little bird himself could make his escape. Non-negotiable. Something like awe bringing a lump to Riddler‘s throat while Ed himself watched, half in and half out of his own body, forever awed by Oswald’s enormous capability for love and its inability to cause him anything but misery.

Still, if not the comfort of his own company, Oswald always had the confidence in his abilities and was never knocked from his pedestal for long. For Ed, left alone to keep his own counsel, bad things always seemed to happen. 

\--  
  
There’s a shadow following him. He’s sure of it. Not GCPD, not Penguin’s men, not his alter. Whoever it is, it’s enough to make what little uncovered skin he has prickle as though it’s covered with fire ants. 

He takes his next “supply run” through a demolished boutique in Midtown, grabbing some undershirts still wrapped in paper, a pale lavender “Turkish towel” wrapped in cellophane (the familiar cotton weave and tasseled ends making his racing heart stop for a brief moment), and, finally, a pair of black leather gloves in his size. He feels like it’s easier to breathe the second he slips them on.  
  
\--  
  
He treats himself to a bath the final night. The term “bath” being generous -- considering it’s little more than the heated contents of two 1-liter water bottles poured over his shivering parts as he scrubs himself clean with a mild soap. Washing his hair takes longer than usual as he maneuvers his fingers around the healing parts of his skull and the water quickly grows cool and silty. It is as much a bath as what Marie Antoinette would have had -- or one of her handmaidens. He dries himself with his new towel (not as soft as he remembers his mother's being, but still super-absorbent and quick-drying). 

The clothes will have to wait until morning. No chip means no remote access to his person, which means he can probably get away with not sleeping fully clothed. He tucks himself into bed, leaves the lock undone when he realizes the key is in his pants, currently draped over the side of the bathtub.

The last two pills go down the easiest.

His dream companion is oddly silent tonight, watching pensively rather than loudly examining and commenting on the state of the room room. Ed thought his state of undress might at least merit comment, or the sheet tucked over a bare shoulder, the lack of voluntary bondage. 

Nothing.

It’s up to him to start the conversation then. But what to say? He’s grown accustomed to a reactive role when it comes to Oswald. What can he possibly say that isn’t a volley of something his old friend said?

Perhaps his silence was the inspiration for what came next. 

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

The question takes both of them by surprise. But the shock he feels in his chest outweighs the curiosity in his fever dream’s eyes. 

“You didn’t say anything… even after the crash, you said nothing. We just carried on as usual. For weeks,” he says, voice growing ragged. “If you were never going to tell me, if you were just going to keep me on in your home, if you were going to use me to take out your enemies and keep you in power, why wouldn’t you at least tell me what it was _for_ ?”  
  
The misery in his companion’s expression -- his brain filling in the gaps with reflections of anguish he’d seen too often -- makes his stomach hurt. Worse than meds (or scavenged food, or a utility knife cleaved through his skin).

He had not wanted to make his friend miserable. He had wanted to be of use, to be resplendent and see resplendence as the man he admired so much -- who had saved Ed from Arkham’s madness -- reached for him and him alone. And if Oswald had told him and the dark recesses of his mind had left him to drift or drown, he might have still mitigated any pain his inadequacies caused. 

“Do you have someone inside that mocks you, too?“

The Oswald hallucination shakes his head, sharp eyes misty.

“Just memories.“

Ed snorts (lowered inhibitions, this definitely needs to be the final night for the pain meds).

“Memories are notorious unreliable. Our brains are plastic and habit forming, shaped by the incidental and prone to confirmation bias. We only see what fits preconceived patterns.“

“Some of those patterns are particularly difficult to shake.“

“Allow me to point out another one then: you are… ridiculously easy to get attached to."

He didn’t have an alternate description, not even for a figment of his imagination; a stupor talking back to him in the near wake of twilight. Having a friend had been new for him. Having this kind of friend was new. Inspired devotion in a way that was not rehearsed from a lifetime of observations or performed out of expectation. Being Oswald’s friend, being grateful for him and basking in the attention that he got from him felt natural, instinctive in a way few things in his life had been.

He had an early habit of turning his back when people wanted to hug him. As he shot up in height and the narrow list of people who tried to hug him became nonexistent, he tried to acclimate, observe what others did and mirror their actions. Oswald’s hugs were different. He wasn’t obligated, not bound by any social custom, and Oswald wasn’t offended if he didn’t return the embrace. He didn’t need a mirror. The contact could be as much or as little as he needed in the moment and Oswald never found his reaction strange or inappropriate. When Oswald hugged him, he felt hugged, held. 

The Oswald in his mind smiles one last time.

"Likewise."

\--

When the door to the library opens with a slam, he reaches for the gun on the table instinctively. Holds on to it when he sees just who has forced their way in, though his finger slips from the trigger position to lay across the barrel. 

"Good evening, Edward. I trust you are well?"  
  
The ephemera he had conversed with for the last three days and the man in front of him could not be more different. Oswald, unfettered by the limits of his mind and memories, remained vibrant, strobing with fury and thwarted effort. That sharp drive that allowed him to resurrect himself half a dozen times and Ed at least once. Ed held his breath, felt oddly light as the pitch was made, knew what his answer would be as soon as the words were spoken:

“Fate has different plans for us.”


End file.
